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Monday, March 29, 2010

If you have kids who own their own computers, an inexpensive lamp timer is an excellent way to enforce a digital curfew. I can assure you that your child is occasionally using the Internet at 3:00 am, and this is not helping him or her stay focused in class.

There are other good reasons to run the electrical power for your DSL modem, home router, and switch (if you have one) through a timer. Home routers have very little memory, and their RAM can become exhausted, which may limit the degree to which they can adequately perform stateful packet inspection. It should be noted that most of the home routers in operation today are unpatched for vulnerabilities which can render them useless as security devices. By rebooting these flimsy devices on a daily basis, you can reduce the number of problems you experience with them.

In addition, by turning off the Internet for five hours a night (i.e. midnight to 5:00 am), you can reduce your attack window by 20%. This makes your computer significantly less desirable to the botnet master seeking 24/7 uptime. It may also reduce your exposure to hackers in other time zones.

Midnight to 5:00 am is an ideal time to schedule nightly anti-virus and Windows Defender scans. Correspondingly, you should adjust your Automatic Updates feature in Windows to download updates at 2:00 pm (instead of 2:00 am).

In addition to removing the temptation for your kids to chat all night, you will improve your family's safety by limiting Internet activity to a period when an adult may be able to provide some measure of supervision.